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Tuesday, 16 June 2015

Community Building on Twitter

For those of you who maybe unaware, as well as a Facebook and G+ account, we also have an account on Twitter. This is one of the tools we are using to enable us to be share the stories of what we are doing throughout the district and engage with different groups of people. One of the features in particular that we are using are lists.

Lists are an effective way to filter your followers by certain
factors decided by you. Users that have 100s or 1000s of people that they are following can't filer their news-stream to allow them to find they key information they are looking for. By creating lists, they can organise the people they are following into lists and this allows them to focus on select areas.

So how are we in SW Herts using lists...

1) Towns in the district

This list breaks the district into the towns that makes it up and creates a list for each of them. Currently, we have lists for Watford, Bushey, Croxley, Rickmansworth and The Langleys. These lists contain accounts of people, businesses, charities and community groups that live, work and play in that particular town. Online, there are few places were you can go and find a list of what is going on in a particular town at any given moment or what is coming up. Currently, we have nearly 400 people in the Watford list as well as nearly 150 in the Rickmansworth list so please do check them out if you are keen to find out what is going on in the area.

2) Sport in SW Herts

Simply, this list contains all the details of local sports teams in the SW Herts area. Maybe you are keen to join a new team in the area or find out the latest results from the area, looking at you +Reason .....! This list is growing at the moment and if you know of any local teams on Twitter, please let us know and we can get them in the list also.

3) L4G Venues
One of the things #Link4Growth is passionate about is promoting those that help us. That is why we have a list dedicated to the venues that help promote us and host our events. This list gives us an effective way of finding their accounts and sharing what they are up to. As a result, they get greater exposure and hopefully more customers. Many of our venues are on Twitter so do check the list out.

4) Local Reporters
Sometimes it may not be enough for you to simply tweet your way to success. Sometimes, some traditional advertising is required and this list provides you with accounts for people at the Watford Observer, My News (which covers most of the district) and accounts such as @WatfordForYou. These guys are designed to promote what you do so contact them should you need to get your message out there!

5) Local Politics

By its nature, #Link4Growth is an apolitical organisation and simply aims to help rebuild community and engage all sectors of it. Politics shouldn't not be something that we do every 5 years and a successful community should see its decision makers in contact and engaged with the electorate. As a result, this list details all those decision makers on Twitter, This list will increase the more we engage with them and explain to them the benefits of being active on Twitter. If you Councillor, MP and Borough Council is not on Twitter, tell them to do so and we can pop them into the list.

6) Charities in SW Herts
It is clear that local charities can suffer from a 'cloak of invisibility' and they can struggle to get known to the community their serve. In Watford alone, there are 800 charities and there isn't a current list of who they are. This list enables people to find out what charities there are in the area, what they do and an easy way for them to engage with them to see how they can help each other.

We have only just started populating these lists with tweeters and the more #Link4Growth grows in the area, the more accounts we can add to the lists and the more detailed it will be for people to find out what is going on in SW Herts, If you are not following @SWHerts on Twitter, please do so and we can then make sure you are added to the relevant lists.